


ghost in the machine

by pprfaith



Series: Vampire Character Studies [2]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Typical Levels of everything, Character Death, Character Study, F/M, I'm really not sure what i did there okay?, Identity Issues, Plotless, Reincarnation, darkish, doppelgangers, except sex, introspective, not beta-ed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 05:10:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6142504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elena Gilbert and all the things she knows from birth.</p>
<p>(She is all of them and all of them are her.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	ghost in the machine

**Author's Note:**

> This has been flying around my harddrive for at least a year because it's weird and not really finished. 
> 
> But I also sort of like it and I'm cleaning out the unfinished folder, so there you go.

+

Here are some of the things Elena Gilbert knows from birth:

1 Her face is not new.

2 Beware of witches.

3 Brothers come in pairs of heartbreak.

4 The feeling of new life, squirming in her womb, and the hollowness that comes after.

5 She will die young. 

Once, when she is eight, she writes it all down in crayon and painstaking child’s handwriting. Stares at the construction paper for half an hour, wondering how she can know these things, wondering what they _mean_.

Then she wads it up into a tight ball and flushes it down the toilet. She blames Jeremy for the resulting flooding of the bathroom and gets away with it.

+

When Elena is sixteen, there is a prince who comes riding into town on a horse and slays all her monsters for her. 

Except, except, his horse is a vintage car the color of blood and he himself one of the monsters. 

She deals. 

If there is one thing Elena Gilbert is very, very good at, it’s dealing. 

So she has her fairy tale backwards. At least it’s still a fairy tale. 

Her face in the mirror, that eternally familiar stranger, smiles sadly.

“Stop lying to yourself,” she orders. Elena ignores her. 

+

“Klaus isn’t his real name, is it?” she asks Elijah, between one truce and another, before she ever lays eyes on the man planning to murder her. 

He’s inexplicably sitting in the window seat in her room. There is no reason for him to be there at all, but he is, examining her leather bound journal without opening it. Admiring the flowers embossed on the cover, delicate handy work. The last thing her mother ever gave her. 

Elena is sitting cross-legged on her bed, watching him. A week ago, she made a deal with him that signed her own life away for the safety of her family. Three days ago, Damon and Alaric tried to kill him. 

It’s strange, how she’s incorporated attempted homicide into her life. How blood and premeditated murder seem almost normal, by now. 

Elijah looks up from her perusal, frowning. When he sees she’s serious, he shrugs lightly. “Few of us use our real names anymore. Times change and language changes with it.”

She wonders what his name was, long ago, if it was something similar to ‘Elijah’, or another sequence of sounds entirely. 

“Why do you ask?”

A headshake. “I don’t know. It seems… wrong. Klaus. It doesn’t sound right.”

She has no basis of comparison to decide that and they both know it. 

Elijah stays most of the night, seated safely by the window, telling her stories to write in her diary, stories with all the actors dead for centuries and no lessons to be gleaned from them.

+

“Have the dreams started, yet?” Katherine – Katerina, was that her first name? – demands, casually flopping onto Stefan’s bed besides Elena. The brothers are downstairs, fighting over how to protect their human, as usual. 

“What dreams?” 

Katherine laughs, tucking a strand of hair behind Elena’s ear faster than she can jerk away. “The ones where you’re encased in stone and all around you, the dead are screaming.”

Elena is saved from having to answer by pottery flying into the fireplace downstairs. 

+

“I’m Elena,” she says, begs, whispers, pleads, screams, cries. 

She doesn’t think it’s normal for anyone to have to prove their identity on an almost daily basis. 

But just about every vampire she’s ever met has called her Katherine at least once and Klaus and Elijah both have muttered bitten-off “Tat-,”s when faced with her unexpectedly. 

Every time it happens, she feels like the consolation prize. Every time it happens, she snaps out her own name with more force, more fury.

“I’m _Elena_!”

+

It’s not reincarnation. 

Out of the four of them, only one is truly dead. 

Out of the four of them, only Tatia is at peace. 

The rest of them are still alive, for a given value of the word, but Elena knows their childhood dreams and secret wishes. 

It’s not reincarnation. 

She reads a lot, before her parents die and she truly understands any of what she is, about the mass unconscious and genetic memory and how most people think it’s bogus. 

Even later, when she has more pieces of the puzzle, she never quite understands what she is. 

Magic, Amara’s memories insist.

Fate, Tatia adds.

The short fucking straw, Katherine jeers. 

All of them are right.

+

“You’re awfully calm, love, about dying for me,” Klaus observes, leading her by the hand like a lamb to the slaughter. 

Only there’s really no ‘like’ about it, because this is exactly what it is. 

Jules is dead in a heap on the ground, Katherine is desiccating in strangely graceful repose, equally undone. She volunteered in the end, a twisted sort of grace to her as she convinced her hunter to take her instead. 

“I didn’t do it for you,” she sneered only minutes ago, across ring of fire. Elena smiled at her with Katherine’s own face and they both knew the words were a lie. In the end, they are all sacrifices. In the end, they don’t know how to die if there’s no an altar under them and a monster above them.

Elena shakes her head to cover the shaking of her hand in his. “I’m dying for my family,” she rebukes, gently, almost. 

Klaus sneers. “Don’t contradict me, love,” he orders, perfectly arrogant and arrogantly perfect, even as he bends to drain her dry.

She isn’t, though. Contradicting him.

+

If she didn’t have Katherine’s face, Stefan never would have returned to Mystic Falls. 

She can be grateful for that, if nothing else, she figures. 

+

History repeating itself looks like this:

Girl with dark eyes and darker hair, falling in love with a forbidden man. 

Amara dies here, diverges before the story gets really interesting.

Falling pregnant. 

Giving birth. 

Tatia puts steel in her spine and a knife in her boot, straps her baby to her back and marches until she finds a new village to call her own, where she can raise her child and not be called a whore for never divulging the father’s name.

Divergence.

Katherine buries her grief and runs far, far away, to a place where no-one knows the shape of her belly under her dress. A place where two brothers find her, court her, love her, murder her. Time passes. Brothers again, and loss.

Rewind. 

Tatia and brothers, the same brothers, the same fate, her daughter orphaned far too young. 

Rewind. 

Fast forward.

Elena and brothers and brothers and the memory of an empty belly that haunts her from before puberty.

Not one of them lives beyond twenty. 

+

“Nik,” she says, later, after dying and living again, and the word sits right on her tongue. It fits the shape of her stolen lips. Nik. Tatia liked the soft beginning and the cracking end of it, like fur and claws.

He snarls, halfhearted at best. “Don’t call me that again, love.”

She wonders if he even notices the way he keeps calling her that.

+

She lives, she dies, she lives again. 

Katherine is a ghost in her skull beside the others now and once, late at night, awake in a bed – Damon’s, Stefan’s, Elijah’s, Klaus’, her own - she stares at the ceiling and whispers, “Yes, they have.”

But Katherine already knows about the dreams. She’s in them. 

+

Brothers and love and hate and blood and sometimes, sometimes she considers just taking herself out of the equation.

Without her, her boys might finally make peace with each other.

They never let her though, and she wonders how none of them can see the way they’re all spinning in circles. 

+

Tatia named her daughter Ania, Katerina called hers Nadia. Amara never even held her own and Elena brushes her hand over her stomach in the shower and mouths: Miranda, Jenna, Rose, Vicky, Anna, Lexi, Andy, Isobel.

Presses the heel of her palm into soft skin. Amara, Tatia, Katerina, Elena. Amara, Tatia, Katerina, Elena. 

“I don’t think I want to have children,” she tells the guidance counsellor at school. The old woman smiles like she doesn’t believe it. 

+

“Which one of us did you love the most?” she demands of Elijah one night, vicious and angry with him. “Can you even tell the difference anymore?”

Because god knows she can’t. 

He snarls, breaks her neck and is long gone before she revives. 

+

The thing, though, the thing, is this: All of her love all of them. Always. 

It’s a problem. 

+

“I’m Elena.”

Truth.

Lie. 

+

Here is the one thing Elena Gilbert knows all her lives:

None of it matters.

+


End file.
